Free Leonard Cohen and Philosophy by Jason Holt

performance even more layers of significance. Occasionally, Cohen will kneel during a song, which can carry wildly different meanings depending on the context—he may be taking time for a little prayer (a pilgrim who has seen the angels, “the sublime Webb Sisters”), he may be serenading an absent mistress or his “shepherd of strings,” Javier Mas, like a devoted fan or even a gay lover. Either way, Cohen’s masculine performance is powerful enough to be taken seriously while still remaining in flux and ironical, driving home Butler’s point that true gender identity is a fiction, always “an imitation without an origin” (p. 188).
    In this way, Cohen’s songs ultimately answer the question “What is a real man?” by putting this very idea into doubt. If there were such a thing, of course, he’d “know that kind of man” (“The Stranger Song”). He knows them all.

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    The End of the World and Other Times in The Future
    G ARY S HAPIRO
    I n an interview with his biographer Sylvie Simmons, Leonard Cohen identifies the main interests in his work as “women, song, religion” (p. 280). These are not merely personal concerns for Cohen, they are dimensions of the world that he tries to understand as a poet, singer, and thinker.
    Now it’s something of a cliché to see the modern romantic or post-romantic singer or poet in terms of personal struggles, failures, triumphs, and reversals. Poets sometimes respond by adopting elusive, ironic, enigmatic, or parodic voices: think, in their different ways, of Bob Dylan and Anne Carson. Yet Cohen has always worn his heart on his sleeve or some less clothed part of his body: he let us know, for example, that Janis Joplin gave him head in the Chelsea hotel while their celebrity limos were waiting outside. We want to know all about Suzanne, Marianne, and the sisters of mercy (two traveling young women whom he gave chaste shelter one night). Cohen’s many biographers are obsessed with his loves, depression, career ups and downs, Montreal Jewish origins, Buddhist practice and monastic retreats.
    Recently, provoked in part by the album Old Ideas , and an ambitious, successful world tour, Cohen’s public has shown interest in how he is dealing with aging, or more subtly, with the artist’s meeting the challenge of the late career. Rather than focusing on Cohen’s life (multiple biographies alreadyexist) I want to think with him about the meaning—or more specifically meaning s —of time, a theme he clearly addresses in the album The Future (1992). As the Christian philosopher Augustine said about time, we all think that we know what it is until we ask ourselves to define it.
    Meanings of Time
    In The Future Cohen asks and finds some answers. Let’s begin by looking at the first two songs, one about the end of time, the other about endless waiting, and then ask if these are the only ways of experiencing time in Cohen’s universe. The title song evokes a vision of an apocalypse at the end of time. “Waiting for the Miracle” is a dark anatomy of a life based on deferral, on putting things off. We all want “Democracy” but when and how will it come? “Closing Time” is the hour when the bar closes, yet possibly time itself is closing. All lovers, Cohen says (covering a classic Irving Berlin song), should vow eternal love, love “always.” These songs concern the experience—more precisely a range of various actual and possible experience s— of time. They deal with what philosophers call the phenomenology of time: sudden and startling change, interruption, boredom, anticipation of major events, and vows of eternal fidelity. Cohen invites us to think our way through a spectrum of ways of experiencing time (“temporalities,” some would say). The Future consistently interrogates time. It explores and articulates different forms of temporality from religious, romantic, political, and artistic perspectives. It invites us to think about whether and how we can live